Jen Sincero

American success coach and author whose You Are a Badass delivers irreverent, profanity-laced self-help advice about breaking self-limiting beliefs and building the life you want.

Jen Sincero spent most of her thirties and forties in financial struggle before hiring a life coach and eventually becoming one herself. You Are a Badass, published in 2013, is the distilled version of what she believes turned her life around: a direct, often profane argument for identifying and dismantling self-limiting beliefs, building conviction in your own worthiness, and taking action toward goals you’ve been avoiding. The book became a long-running bestseller not despite its bluntness but because of it — Sincero’s voice is irreverent and conversational in ways that the typical self-help register is not.

The book’s strengths are its energy, humor, and directness. Sincero doesn’t hedge, doesn’t moralize, and makes her advice concrete and actionable. For readers who find conventional self-help either too dry or too precious, You Are a Badass has a tone that actually engages. The exercises at the end of each short chapter are useful prompts for self-reflection.

The criticism is that the underlying philosophy — you create your reality, your beliefs determine your outcomes, success is available to anyone willing to commit — relies on assumptions about agency and circumstance that don’t hold equally for everyone. The book is also deeply invested in financial success as a metric of progress, which is a legitimate value orientation but not a universal one. You Are a Badass works best as a kick in the right direction for readers who are stuck in their own heads; it is less useful as a comprehensive worldview.